Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Futurism vs. Futuruisn't

Charles Stross has got a lovely post on how difficult it would be explaining some mundane bit of our present technological lifestyle to someone from just thirty years ago -- how do you explain gold farming to someone who's never seen the Internet? Although I found myself explaining gold farming to non-gamers last week, and it's hardly easier now ...

Couple that with Cory's essay on futurism here, and the theme of sci-fi really being about the present comes home. That is, it's almost impossible to write about the future in any effective/meaningful way.

I faced that challenge, and had it beat me like a red-headed step-child, when I took a swing at adapting Foundation a few years ago.

(You hear those two sounds? The first was about half the science fiction fans on the planet fainting at the prospect of one of the writers of Transformers adapting Isaac Asimovs' Holy Trilogy. The other was the sound of the remaining science fiction fans lighting torches)

I was partnered with Shekhar Kapur -- who has a blog now, of all things. Huh. This seemed like a pretty spiffy idea. He was just off Elizabeth, and the canny executive's thinking was that the future, to a great degree, is a costume drama in the opposite direction. That is, there'd be lots of things that need explaining, totally different political and social situations the audience must understand instantly, and quite a lot different wardrobes and thingamabobs the audience should find fascinating rather than ridiculous.

The line between Blackadder II and Elizabeth is finer than you think.

Shekhar was a very fine person to work with. Obsessively introspective, dedicated to exploring the inner lives of his characters in a way that frankly befuddled most Western film humans we encountered. Foundation is a big, deep bastard, and while Asimov's work has the patina of the 50's on it (atomic priests! space houswives!) at its core it's about free will. If someone could predict the future with mathematical certainty, is that a blessing or a curse? Is belief in a mathematically predetermined future effectively faith? I was fascinated by that concept, and wound up creating a fairly complex thematic web between:

-- the Foundation, representing order, but decaying-- the Mule. Pure chaos, the virtue of free will but nominally evil-- and Bayta. No longer the space housewife, but torn between these two competing ideologies.

Ironically, the big emotions and ideas laid themselves out easily. Benefits of adapting within the genre, I guess. But one of my big problems was that I actually knew something about science. That kept screwing up my script.

I didn't know about the Singularity at that point, of course. But I damn well knew that a couple thousand years in the future, we'd be doing things differently. I kept putting little things into the script I thought would be normal bits of future tech that we as an audience would find interesting. Gesture-linked atmospheric nanites that would then resolve into the object you'd just shorthanded with the twitch of a finger. Translucent, reconfigurable energy force weapons (I've used those a bit in Blue Beetle's constantly reconfiguring armor). Galactic maps hidden in the genetic code of Foundation Agents. Not to mention the Visi-Sonar.

The problem was, as I layered on the things I found sci-fi cool, the script became denser and denser for non-sci fi readers who were expecting big goddam spaceships. Not that I didn't have big goddam spaceships, and a chase through multiple hyperjumps right after she shot her way THROUGH YES I SAID THROUGH A MASSIVE BATTLE CRUISER --

Ahem.

At the same time, Shekhar and I went down the rabbit hole a bit with the themes of the movie. The nature of good and evil, action and inaction, predestination and free will -- the speeches we crafted were occasionally achingly lovely (He's a bit of a poet, that Shekhar). But where one would accept such speechifying from an Elizabethan character because we have, as a culture been conditioned to accept such things from Shakespeare-y folk, coming from techno-priests it seemed to grate.

We just couldn't seem to break away from the script-writing process. For the execs, they needed cleaner, simpler -- no, never dumber, I liked these folk. The lead exec was one of the smartest I've ever worked for in Hollywood. But the studio needed a mainstream movie. It had to be the future, but this bizarre, borderline incomprehensible future was ... not it.

For Shekhar, it was his natural tendency for perfection.

For me, it was Foundation. This is Asimov. We have to get this right.

All in all, everybody loved every draft, it was the beginning of a new trilogy ... and it went away into the vaults as inertia took over and we all drifted off to other projects.

When I recently moved, I reread some of the drafts. There's one in there, an early one, that's I'm pretty proud of. The themes are dramatically presented and resonant. I finally got my female action-scientist hero. And our Mule was, to be blunt, fucking brilliant.

The rest of the drafts, written over the next two years, are incrementally more ... laden. With notes, with ideas, with speeches, with ambition. We juggled the presentation of the timeline with maybe six odd versions ... the scripts eventually descend into foggy symbolism. We fell into the honey trap of Asimov's genius.

Turns out when you pit a living will and against a dead hand, the dead hand does indeed win.

286 comments:

One of the things I've come to realize, mostly watching John From Cincinnati is that A) Milch has a knack for writing dialog that is both completely unnatural but also interesting as hell and B) When done correctly, this sort of speachifying can work in ways naturalistic dialog doesn't. Everyone on JFC and Deadwood for that matter was saying things on at least two if not three or four different levels.

My point being, non-natural dialog can work, but man you've got to know what you're saying.

Yes, and I think that's why you need the freedom of being Milch to pull that sort fo thing off. When you see this stuff on the page, it often just lays there. DEADWOOD's speeches without Ian McShane? I don't think so.

Would it work to strip out the characters and the themes, and move away from the Foundation anchor? I mean, inspired by may be a curse to movies, but it's not necessarily a bad thing for storytellers, or even scripts. Can you move away from Asimov enough to tell the story you're trying to tell? Or are the two inextricably intertwined?

I wonder about this sort of thing, because any story I read is almost by definition inspired by something else, since the fiction I read mostly historical fiction or SF, but people like Joe Haldeman or Charles Stross or even Aaron Sorkin can manage to give a unique perspective on an old story. (Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow get a pass, since they're, well, a little crazy when it comes to their storytelling method).

I for one wouldn't mind seeing a movie that included both an interesting argument on the concept of free will AND a modicum of explosions and a big space ship or two.

Anyway, I guess that's my question: is it possible to get so far away from the source material that you have to effectively throw the book away and start fresh?

Foundation is one of those books that I always keep meaning to read, but fear that it will never work for me. Like E.E. Doc Smith or Heinlein, their work is too much an artifact of the past for me to actually absorb them as the classics they are presented as.

I don't mean to imply that I don't like or respect Asimov; I do. The issue is that I have a hard time reading a lot of SF from before the 60s...the language and cultural artifacts sometimes seem so ARCANE....and yet they're not so old that it intuits to me that it should be that way. One expects obscure or out of date speech from Mercutio, not R. Daneel Olivaw. However, of those writers, Asimov is certainly the one I could absorb the most.

Anyway, I guess that's my question: is it possible to get so far away from the source material that you have to effectively throw the book away and start fresh?

You know, guys who write adaptations -- which is most of us -- always go back and forth on that. My rule for single novels is to read the book twice, and then never look at it again. Anything I remember as a reader is important or resonant enough to include. It'll probably be the same stuff for other readers.

This may seem insane, but I've had the luxury of adapting living writer, and to a one they've all loved my work on their books. So it's a process I'll keep.

I believe, though, that a writer's presentation and the ideas he's presenting are inextricably linked. In Foundation's case, I discovered that the idea of the Mule's unrequited love for Bayta is a pretty crucial hinge for his greater decisions, his evolving morality. And that led into even bigger central themes of the work ...

So in short (too late) no. There's a reason the work is resonant, and it's bound up in the presentation. You'd be ill-served chucking it all over the shoulder.

I know it's not screenwriting, but you may want to have a look at the way Lois McMaster Bujold deals with technology in her sci-fi novels. She imagines lots of interesting technology, but the technological details are explained only when absolutely necessary to the story. The rest of the time, the tech details stay out of the way of story and character and are not missed.

" [...] the technological details are explained only when absolutely necessary to the story."

The late John M. Ford did something similar, except he left out every detail that a character in the book wouldn't notice or think about. Ford worked out all kinds of background details for Growing Up Weightless (The entire lunar railway system, for example) but the only parts that we see are the ones that the characters would take note of.

You can take this too far. There was an SF mystery from the 1950s whose title escapes me whose author made a very similar decision to Ford's and so despite the fact that it's set one or two thousand years from now and the details of life are completely alien to us, nothing is explained except what someone living in that situation would need explained. It's completely incomprehensible.

It's not just science fiction that has trouble going too far into the future.

I did my post-doc at Xerox-Palo Alto Reseach Center in the mid-1980's. PARC was a place for computer science, roughly 5 years earlier, akin to being in Copenhagen in the 1920's while quantum emchanics was being thrashed out. At PARc the bitmap screen, the mouse, Word, GUI, all was created (in addition to the laser printer) and handed to upper management who did nothing with it.

Well, not quite true. They did force a group leader to show a visitor the new innovations they were working on. The group leader did not want to give away what she was working on, but when it went all the way up the chain to the director of corporate research, she was forced to. Once Steve Jobs saw the GUI, he went back to Apple, told them to do the same (ignoring their protests that it couldn't be done, as he had just seen it) and the MAC was born.

Upper managements eventual story that they told about this was that the research people were too successful. Charged with developing the next billion dollar product, they presented the corporation with something that was 5 years ahead of its time. Management knows what to do with innovations that are 6 months ahead of the curve, but something truly different, they were flumoxed. In their defense, the earlyPCs at Xerox (codenamed ALTOs) were bigger and clunkier that the MAC. But seeing around corners that others have not yet perceived as corners (in one of my favorite Mile Drendal phrases) can be a double edged sword.

And at the risk of going to long, at the end of my book I cite a NY Times article that emphasized the difficulty of comc books and sci-fi predicting the future. consider the pilot episode of Lost in Space, created in the 1960's, describing a space launch in October 1997. In mission control are rows of computer monitors, with identical, crew-cut, white short sleeved engineers monitoring specs as the Jupiter II prepares to lift-off. Next to each engineer is a small metal disk.

Because in the 1960's it was inconceivable that in 1997 Mission control would be a smoke-free environment, and there would be no call for ash trays to be by each monitor.

Compared to predicting future social development, getting the tech right is a snap.

Cheers, and I'm thrilled you are back to regular posting. One of my favorite sites.

The sound you might have heard from here was my eyebrow being raised. (What is the sound of one eyebrow going up?)

An Asimov movie? That would mean it would have ... characters ... and dialog!

It would be really interesting to see FOUNDATION with characters and dialog.

In many ways I would think Asimov would be ideal to adapt, 'cause there's so much room to put personality in it. (I actually adapted the ROBOT CITY series for TV for a producer, but Asimov only sketched that series out for other writers.)

Glad you respect Asimov so much, but he surely was in need of an update. In the way that, say, Ursula K. LeGuin is not.

I'm mixed on adaptations. I think the reason Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies is the way that the basic story was lifted from one of my favorite novels and crafted, with gorgeous language, into a film that absolutely stands alone.

Then again, I found the parts of Lord of the Rings that strayed from the book--the expansion of Arwen's character, for example--to actually hurt the story.

I think that it's generally best for the story if the writer isn't too big a fan of the source material--all the adaptations I've read of Ender's Game were very clearly written by fans...or, you know, Orson Scott Card.

Has anything been done with Zelazny's Amber books?

Also:

Good luck with that woman-scientist-action hero thing. Cold day in Hell, etc.

I still say that Deadwood is, at it's heart, a show about profanity. I mean, like, the way The West Wing is a show about people who work at the White House.

And I can't speak much for Smith, but to my mind Robert Heinlein's work has always been much more an artifact of his... shall we say... somewhat unique mindset than a time period necessarily - the remarkable differences between his earlier and later works shows that pretty clearly.

Also meant to say in the first place: what the hell ever happened to Shekhar Kapur anyway? I loved Elizabeth when it came out, but then he went on to make that DOA Four Feathers (Mark XXVIII) and I don't think we've heard from him since...

Not a Blue Beetle thread, but since you mentioned the morphing armor...

I ordered the two books available from Amazon and just finished Shellshocked. Other than Miller's Dark Knight follow up, I haven't really dipped into the medium since the '80s, when I used to hang around St. Mark's Comics and browse the Marvels while I waited for the weird independent stuff to come in.

Now, thanks to the characters and the intriguing premise and the snappy dialogue, I'm hooked. And here I thought, just as I've passed beyond my cavity-prone years, that I was no longer in danger of superhero recidivism.

" [...] to my mind Robert Heinlein's work has always been much more an artifact of his... shall we say... somewhat unique mindset than a time period necessarily - the remarkable differences between his earlier and later works shows that pretty clearly."

Have you read Heinlein's For Us The Living? That was an unpublished utopian novel that he wrote in the 1930s. It's interesting to see how many of the ideas he used in that book, which he never managed to sell, turn up later in his cranky phase.

A few years back, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin got tapped to write a sort of "betweenquel" trilogy, following Hari Seldon's dotage. The Foundation has been established and he's hanging around Trantor fine-tuning his equations and waiting to die. Then he notices signs in the equations that history is being tampered with.

Like the Kingsbury novel mentioned above, the books try to both modernize the Empire, and to explain why the Singularity didn't happen.

The fixes and justifications are interesting but a bit strained. It all amounts to the robots (from the "Caves of Steel" epoch) pulling strings and manipulating things. The static, hierarchical, no-real-progress Empire is the ultimate result of the Zeroeth Law: You can disobey the other laws if humanity as a whole might come to harm.

Seriously, though, she's all over the consequences of technology, without getting hung up on the operational details. You don't need to know how a "nerve disruptor" works to know that it's a brutal weapon.

Or consider her "uterine replicator". The reader is shown that it's a semi-portable device for growing human embryos to full gestational age in vitro. That's all the reader really needs to know about it to follow her stories about the social consequences of such a device.

It might be cool if she took a whack at explaining the science behind its function, but it's more likely that such an explanation would bog down the story.

While I'm convinced that studios are writhing masses of idiots who have no idea how to not fuck up a great idea, the fact that someone thought to ask you to write Foundation for the screen gives me a bit of hope.

I'd love to hear more about writing it; was it the mixture of fun and terror that I think it was?

JFC: Not only the actor reading it, but the actors responding to what the say, the elements included in the show, the framing of the sequence...Watching episode six I followed the bulk of that final speech John gave, but reading the transcript of it on HBO's Inside the Episode I couldn't follow much of anything.

You tried to adapt Foundation? Wow. As a feature? Holy crap. My hat's off to you. The Star Wars prequels always struck me as extra-shitty attempts at adapting Foundation, with Force-hooey taking the place of Seldon's psychohistory. Whenever I would re-read the books, I was always afraid there would be some sort of ghastly Star Wars-y f-up of them some day. I like your approach to it, though. Damn, that would be cool to see.

And as an archaeologist, I think the problem with most futurists is that they don't know jack about culture, how it changes, or what long term change looks like.

And at the risk of going to long, at the end of my book I cite a NY Times article that emphasized the difficulty of comc books and sci-fi predicting the future. consider the pilot episode of Lost in Space, created in the 1960's, describing a space launch in October 1997. In mission control are rows of computer monitors, with identical, crew-cut, white short sleeved engineers monitoring specs as the Jupiter II prepares to lift-off. Next to each engineer is a small metal disk.

Because in the 1960's it was inconceivable that in 1997 Mission control would be a smoke-free environment, and there would be no call for ash trays to be by each monitor.

Or that any of the mission control staff would be female or non-white.

"Or that any of the mission control staff would be female or non-white. "

Excellent point. Though while I'm pretty sure they were all male, when I said "white short-sleeved engineers" I was referring to the color of their shirts. I'd have to go back and double check, but its a good bet that, as you say, not only their shirst were white.

John - this is very different in almost every way than what you are describing, and yet ...

I hope you have read Green Shadows, White Whale, by Ray Bradbury. It is his fictionalized account of going to Ireland as a young man in order to tackle, in ascending order - (1)John Huston, who was going to direct the movie version of (2) Moby Dick, and asked Mr. Bradbury to go to (3)Ireland, which, as it turns out, is full of (4) the Irish.

It is a lovely, and touching, and haunting, account of the burns left on a mortal soul touched by the infinite.

One particular phrase that has always stuck with me is the description of a homeless man singing on a bridge - "He did not so much sing as let his soul free."

At any rate, while your post was mainly concerned with the Sci Fi aspect of it, I thought I would just mention the halting step that one takes at the thought of settling in for a long overnight with genius.

Off-topic, or maybe not: I searched your site for any mention of V for Vendetta and was somewhat surprised not to find mention of it other than as a throwaway somewhere. I regard Alan Moore as one of the great writers in the world today - and no one has made a movie version of any of his stories that could hold a limp bouquet of broccoli, really. Do you have any comment on why this should be so difficult? I think he writes very clearly, and seems to pay attention to the visual language of the comics medium exceptionally carefully for someone who doesn't do his own art (a la the visual cues and hints in both Watchmen and V). Just wondering after this post.

At any rate, I started reading your blog pretty regularly after the story about Paul the bartender and the Prince of Absolutely Fucking Nobody, and continue to enjoy it a great deal. I've even purchased a couple of issues of Blue Beetle along the way.

Let me second juancho's suggestion, above, to adapt The Caves of Steel. It's the perfect length for adapting to film; the plot is like a Swiss watch; and since it's a murder mystery, it's easy to get the audience to care about what happens next.

I'd think trying to "retcon" the technology of Foundation with modern stuff would be a a mistake -- besides messing with the atmosphere, there's too much chance of introducing something that would screw up the plot constraints.

Most of Asimov's stuff strikes me as pretty difficult to put in visual format. On the other hand, a lot of Larry Niven's stuff would convert nicely -- say Gil the Arm, or some of the Man-Kzin Wars stories.

Zelazny's Amber would need some really heavy special effects (hellrides?!?), especially once it got to the Courts. On the other hand, something like Isle Of The Dead might make a good movie.

It's only tangentially related really, but the BBC did a radio adaptation of the Foundation trilogy way back in the seventies. The only special effects needed were some classic Radiophonic Workshop sound effects and the visuals in the listener's head. Perfect.

It was pretty much a straight adaptation as I remember, not much added, and only a little taken away. But I guess it was closer to the date of publication than it was to today, computers still monolithic, and no such thing as nanotechnology.

Also, back in the Sixties, the BBC did some TV adaptations of some of the Robot stories, including one featuring Peter Cushing. I never saw those and never will, as they no longer exist, the original tapes having been erased.

Nothing "happened" to Shekar Kapur. He began his career in India making pretty amazing films, most notably "Bandit Queen" (which, if you haven't seen it, what the hell are you waiting for?), made a couple of films here, and is still making films in India as well.

This is prolly a silly comment seeing as I haven't read Foundation since I was in HS back in the 70's. But it seems to me like all the stylistic worries you are talking about could easily be solved by doing something futuristic from the 50's or whenever it was written, but stylistically retro harkening bacl to the 60's. OK, not explaining that well. Something artistically more along the lines of "Sky Captain and the World of Tommorrow". I thought that had an amazing look and feel and texture, and was suprised it wasn't nominated for anything.